Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Spotlight investigation offers a new generation a valuable insight into our troubled past

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Martin McGuinness was filmed walking behind the car as it was being loaded with a huge bomb in 1972
Martin McGuinness was filmed walking behind the car as it was being loaded with a huge bomb in 1972 Martin McGuinness was filmed walking behind the car as it was being loaded with a huge bomb in 1972

For those of us who lived through the Troubles, BBC's Spotlight investigation has so far merely confirmed what we already knew or suspected.

However, the great value of the programme is that it allows a new generation the opportunity to view events as we remember them, not as they are often currently portrayed for political purposes.

The revelations about Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness contained little new information. Paisley made by far the greatest contribution to the rise of sectarianism here in the 1960s, by preaching anti-Catholicism in public and supporting violence in private.

His connections to militant loyalism were well known in the 1960s and his family's holiday home at that time near Kilkeel, allowed him contact with sympathisers in the Mourne area. Two months ago this column identified Thomas McDowell as one of the bombers of the Silent Valley pipeline who came under Paisley's influence and who had previously been described by those who had worked with him as "a right fellow".

The suggestion by some today that the bombs were believed to be the work of the IRA at that time is inaccurate. Republicans were openly supporting the non-violent civil rights campaign and, in any case, did anyone really think that there was an IRA unit in Annalong?

The only surprising allegation about Paisley is that he "funded" the bombs designed to blow Terence O'Neill out of office. It would be interesting to see the evidence, because there was little need for funding. For generations, many quarry workers across Ireland had the opportunity to siphon off gelignite by over-reporting the amount they had used for blasting and taking the surplus home with them. Gelignite was usually free.

That Martin McGuinness was an IRA commander in Derry is hardly news. However, the remarkable footage showing him overseeing the preparation of a car bomb has two significant consequences. It raises the question as to the possible influence it will have over the mind-set of those currently engaged in violence in Derry. Will they use it to justify their actions?

It also suggests that IRA violence was counter-productive. The bombers' target in Spotlight was the Guildhall, possibly because it was Derry's seat of a local government system, which had been gerrymandered since the state was founded.

But by 1971, when this bomb was planted, the civil rights demand for local government reform was being met. Based on the MacRory Report (1970), the new system, for the first time in Irish history, was designed on a series of local councils, encompassing the main towns and their catchment areas.

It abandoned the county system which the English introduced and which is so beloved by the GAA today. It was the most efficient and the fairest system of local government we have ever had. There was no political reason for blowing up the Guildhall in 1971 and endangering the civilian population.

But the story does not end there. Forty years later, when Sinn Féin was in government with the DUP, the two parties replaced MacRory's democratic system by merging selected council areas into geographical religious blocs, so that both of them could maximise their sectarian vote.

So, in the long term, the Guildhall bomb rendered the present local government system just as artificial for sectarian purposes as the one against which the civil rights movement campaigned. George Orwell had a wonderful literary career writing that sort of thing as fiction. Those involved in violence in Derry today might be more usefully engaged in reading some of his novels.

Spotlight helps to explain why an older generation viewed Paisley and McGuinness acting as the Chuckle Brothers in a rather sceptical manner, particularly since neither man had offered the slightest hint of repentance or apology for their past.

What a new generation will make of it all remains to be seen. But as sectarian divisions deepen over Brexit, the result of a likely forthcoming general election here will probably reveal that both sides still find refuge in their own versions of the past.